Frontier Announce Coaster Park Tycoon

Do you want to good Frontier news first or bad Frontier news? They themselves opened with the good news, so let's follow suit: Frontier are making a new rollercoaster sim! The RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 devs plan to kick off a new manage 'em up series in 2016 with Coaster Park Tycoon, though they don't have much to say or anything to show at this point. Then, the bad news. They've laid off 15 folks and dragged development roles back from their studio in Canada's sunny Halifax, which they opened in 2012. But rollercoasters!

All we know about Coaster Park Tycoon for now is that they intend to make it a new series, starting a second big franchise alongside Elite, and that it "is intended to raise that benchmark for 'Tycoon' gameplay even further by combining accessible creative features with a sophisticated simulation." Okay then! Grand.

(Don't mind that screenshot up there - it's RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 'cause I had to have a picture.)

And back to the bad news. An anonymous source Gamasutra that the Halifax studio will close entirely, but that's just rumours for now.

I'm still hoping we'll see Frontier's rollercoaster murder simulator Screamride come from Xbox to PC. It is published by Microsoft and they are pretty insistent that they really for real are interested in PC gaming again for real this time, which is just the sort of false hope I'm reaching for.

Atari are reviving RollerCoaster Tycoon too. Busy times in the coasting world. Especially as games start dabbling with Oculus Rift.